Blogging, media sharing, and your museum

Introduction

In her earlier post, Shauna talked about how museums can utilize many of the available social media tools that exist today. This post will build off of that idea to discuss how museums can use YouTube, Flickr, and other blogs to reach and engage with their audiences.

Graph courtesy of Nina Simon

Blogs

Blogs are a great method for museums to reach out into the online and offsite community. We saw in our first post that 73% of web users consume content, so why not give them the opportunity to read an interesting (and hopefully educational) blog created by your museum? According to Nina Simon, this type of outreach only requires about 7-10 hours of effort. Splitting up the blog's responsibilities amongst several staff members is the recommended method. That way no one can complain that the blog takes up too much time and it keeps things interesting for your readers by sharing a variety of museum voices. Blogs are a great way to get your curators involved with the audiences too. Check out this blog post from Nina Simon for more information about institutional blogs and some great examples.

Better yet, take a cue from the Dulwich Picture Gallery in southeast London, UK and create a blog "for the community by the community." In their paper for Museums and the Web 2010, Alison H.Y. Liu, Sarah McDaid, Jonathan P. Bowen, and Ingrid Beazley describe the Dulwich OnView (DOV) community blog below:

Dulwich OnView (DOV) is a unique example of a museum blog run by volunteers from its Friends and the local community, with posts about both. This combination increases exposure and interest in the museum (Dulwich Picture Gallery in southeast London, UK), attracting new audiences. It uses very little staff time and comes at no financial cost. As Dulwich Picture Gallery (DPG) is often perceived as traditional and conservative, Dulwich OnView has helped to counteract this image and set the Gallery in the context of a local community that loves and supports it.

You might be saying, "But I've never blogged before! I won't know what to do!" I'm here to say that if I can do it, you can too! Blogger and Tumblr offer easy to use templates. If you can word process and attach things in email, you will be able to make a blog. Check out Nina Simon's helpful hints for more blog tips.

YouTube

YouTube began in 2005 as a site to post, watch, and comment on videos. A simple search of "museum" on YouTube yields thousands of hits, with most of these videos being created and shared by the visiting public. Eventually museums began to realize that they could (and probably should) post their own "official" content on YouTube. Some museums have only a handful of videos, while others, such The Smithsonian, have multiple channels on YouTube (A channel is a dedicated stream of videos controlled by a singular entity. Users can subscribe to the channel to receive updates on the latest posts.). Let's take a closer look at the Smithsonian's channel to see how it engages with audience via video.

While navigating the Smithsonian YouTube interface is not exactly the easiest process (every time I watch a video it takes me away from the official channel page!), it is filled with lots of really cool video resources. For instance, I can choose from a number of short video interviews with Smithsonian researches located around the world. These brief informative videos introduce the researcher and allow the viewer to venture inside the researcher's world. Best of all, the researcher explains how his/her research is impacting the world and why it is important. Additionally, I can choose to watch videos that take me behind the scenes at my local museum. The Zoo videos are particularly fantastic. Watch as meals are prepared on a daily basis for the lions, tigers, and bears (oh my!), along with panda pregnancy research, and the first days of adorable lion cubs.

But how many people are actually using the resources available on the many Smithsonian channels? A quick scan of videos shows view numbers ranging from 455 to 37. While 455 seems kind of high, these numbers pale in comparison to a "David After Dentist" (107,832,008 views) or even "Surprised Kitty" (61,003,071). Nevertheless, it is good to know that authoritative, high quality video resources do exist on YouTube. When I was teaching public school prior to my graduate studies, I often relied on museum-supplied videos to supplement my lessons. Video is a great tool to use when trying to explain a concept or illustrate a point with today's youth. When showing a video from the Smithsonian channels, a teacher can feel safe in the knowledge that the video will be educational and appropriate.

Flickr

Photo sites like Flicker burst onto the Internet scene around 2004. Flickr is just one of many photo-centered sites or blog platforms--Tumblr and StumbleUpon are a few others. This post will focus on Flickr as it seems to be the most well known and is utilized by many in the museum community.

If you haven't already done so, check out the National Archives' Flickr pages. They are a fantastic example of how an institution can use Flickr and crowd-sourcing to both enhance the collection and engage with thousands of online visitors. Audience members can explore the collections online, researchers can easily find resources and those that wish to may comment on or tag photos in the collection. Thus, the Archives Flickr pages appeal to a full range of internet users.

Another excellent example and resource can be found in Fiona Romeo and Natasha Wateson's paper for Museums and the Web 2010. This paper outlines how the Royal Observatory in London used Flickr as a platform for their hugely successful online contest and exhibit: Astronomy Photographer of the Year.

Finally, to keep from being redundant: just check out Nina Simon's "Why you should use Flickr" post to get all the reasons (and help) you need to get your museum out there.

Conclusions

Even if you only have a few hours to commit to online engagement, you can provide meaningful user experiences for your online visitors. The most important thing to do is to stick with it. The same advice holds true online as it does in the real world: relationships require trust and nourishment. If you decide to venture online with your museum, make sure that the project (whether blog, video, or pictures) doesn't lose steam and wither away or go static. However, you don't need to invest more than a few man-hours to do it. Remember: there are many online resources out there for the public to access. Studies show that we spend an average of at least 1 hour online per day. Smartphones and tablets allow users to be online and on-the-go virtually anywhere. Why not put your institution's same engaging, educational, inspiring, and provocative content, and reliable resources at their fingertips wherever they are?

Resources:

http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2010/papers/romeo/romeo.html
http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2010/papers/liu/liu.html
http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2010/papers/allen-greil/allen-greil.html  

http://www.flickr.com/commons 

http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2010/papers/dicker/dicker.html  

http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2007/02/20-at-work-why-you-should-use-flickr.html 

http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2008/04/how-much-time-does-web-20-take.html  

http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2007/03/institutional-blogs-different-voices.html 

http://www.youtube.com/user/smithsonianchannel?ob=0&feature=results_main

Guest post part 1: social media communities

A nickel for your thoughts: Growing and sustaining museums’ social media communities

Guest post by Erin Blasco, public programs coordinator and manager of the National Postal Museum’s Facebook and Twitter accounts. Find her on Twitter as @erinblasco

Whether you manage social media accounts for a museum or follow a museum or two on your preferred social network, consider the following statement: “Museum social media communities grow quickly and are relatively self-sustaining.”

Whether it’s a “duh” nod or an exasperated sigh, I’d love to hear your reaction to this statement. Here’s why: at the 2012 Museums & the Web conference in April, a panel of museum social media practitioners will invite consideration of some of the most commonly heard truisms about social media among our colleagues. But you don’t have to be in San Diego to participate. In order to include a variety of voices from around the country, we’re kicking off the conversation early and will continue it both during and after the session. Comment here and your thoughts will filter into the session and the conversation surrounding it.

What do you get for sharing your thoughts, comments, and case studies?

1. The opportunity to step back from drafting tweets and deleting spam YouTube comments to re-discover why museums participate in social media and what we can reasonably hope to gain.

2. Advancing the dialog beyond assumptions will allow us to establish a thoughtful foundation of social media best practices to build upon.

3. Communicating about social media myths not only moves the profession forward but also sharpens our skills at discussing social media goals and myths in our own institutions. This conversation will make us better advocates for our museums’ goals and audiences.

So, do museum social media communities grow quickly and sustain themselves? If you’ve never heard this truism before, consider these: “Let’s make a Facebook page so that hundreds of people will gather to discuss our exhibits.” “There are a lot of people out there who like Civil War stuff; we should start a Twitter account to bring them in.” “Social media is huge; we should make a video and ‘go viral,’ too.” “We’re not reaching enough teens; social media is the answer.” How have you heard this sentiment phrased at your institution? We know some of you have. In fact, when we asked museum professionals to vote on the top “social media myths” meriting deeper discussion, this one was a big winner.

In Part II of this post, we'll pick apart the issue in more detail.